Wednesday, February 06, 2008

A Split Decision!

The Dems split the states, the votes, the delegates and the momentum. I keep bouncing back and forth between these two candidates. I am not sold on Sen. Obama's ability to keep his supporters energized and engaged throughout the process. As is usually the case with a Hope and a Prayer campaign, the burnout rate is high, and the longer this race goes on, the greater chance these new supporters will fall off the wayside. He is also fresh meat for the rabid right. Just the other day, GOP candidate Huckabee went right for the Mideast jugular of Sen Obama, and this was just a softball.

Sen. Clinton is the known, which is good and bad. Her negatives are high but aren't going anywhere. The Right has had 16 years to beat her up and I doubt they have anything new that will effect the electorate. But there is also a large swath of new blood Obama delegate that, short of him being in the Veep slot, will pack up their toys and go home. They are caught up in the frenzy and will return to apathy if 'their guy' doesn't win. It is a double edge sword no matter who gets the nod at this point. What I have found with Clinton supporters is that they want a Democratic candidate in the White House first and foremost, and will commit to work hard regardless of who the nominee is.

In our precinct, when the dust settled, it seemed that the electoral ratios were reversed when you looked at who stayed to actually caucus and agree to the heavy lifting through to November. Listen, if we want to switch to a primary state, then that is fine. But if we re going to be a caucus state, we should caucus and the straw polls and binding ballots should be the last order of business, not the first. I'm afraid a large number of our National delegation will have to plug their nose* to cast their binding ballots, since there won't be any committed supporters of the candidate that are actually delegates.

My situation may be different, being a campus precinct and the large number of students that did the Hit and Run instead of stay and work. Were other peoples' observations similar regarding actual caucus participants, or was mine an anomaly?

Flash
*I don't mean that in the literal sense. The Democratic party has two outstanding candidates that are light years better than the best of the best the opposition can come up with. The Country has tried it their way for almost 8 years and look where that has gotten us. The electorate is smart enough to know we have a real mess to clean up!

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